Jim Gaffigan: finding light in the darkness with humor

Comedian Jim Gaffigan's world has been no laughing matter of late. But humor has been a release valve as his wife and collaborator, Jeannie, has been battling back from surgery in April to remove a life-threatening tumor wrapped around her brainstem.

'She's doing much better,” Gaffigan, who lives in Manhattan, said by phone from a family vacation in his wife's native Wisconsin. 'She's not completely back to normal, but much better than the alternative.”

Some throat paralysis has caused difficulty with swallowing, he said. 'And of course, she had to be married to the guy that only eats. But she's coming back. She can eat soups and stuff like that. It's not something that you take for granted.”

Life came to a screeching halt for Gaffigan, who always has multiple acting, writing and producing projects going at once. Comedy gigs in Israel, Australia and New Zealand were canceled.

Shorter jaunts are manageable, like the downtime they were enjoying earlier this month at a rented lake house in Wisconsin, hanging out with relatives. Gaffigan turned 51 there on July 7, and as the father of five kids ages 4 to 13, he was looking forward to celebrating with a nap after his Hoopla interview.

'That's the only gift I would want,” he said.

He's made his mark talking about his family, and his wife's ordeal will be addressed when he brings his Noble Ape Tour to the U.S. Cellular Center in Cedar Rapids on Saturday night (7/22).

Gaffigan found humor to be 'very instrumental” in helping him process such a scary time.

'I don't think that's unique to a comedian,” he said. 'You have to laugh through some of the awkwardness. Selfishly, I was submerged in the brain tumor land for months now, but for two-and-a-half weeks, that's all I thought about. Once she got out of the woods, I could formulate some ideas that ended up being standup.

'This hour that I'm doing with the Noble Ape Tour is different from all the material I've done,” he said, as he zeroed in on the universal experience of health crises.

'I think humans live in this detached reality of the severity of illness,” he said. 'Understandably, we have to have a healthy detachment or otherwise we'd be like, ‘Oh my gosh!' We're all going to be dealing with this, but we have to live our lives or we'd never relax.”

To make it work in his standup routine, he had to find 'the balance of making it funny and also making it something that appeals to everyone,” he said. 'I hope my standup brings some light to situations, as opposed to me just complaining or being negative. I want to bring some light to the human condition.”

He's used humor to his advantage since grade school. Born in Elgin, Ill., his family moved to Indiana when he was 8 or 9, and he eventually became the class clown. 'In fifth grade, I would tell jokes a tool for socializing when we moved,” he said.

He studied finance in college in Washington, D.C., then worked as a litigation consultant in Tampa, Fla. Miserable in that realm, he moved to New York and found a job as an advertising copy writer, while honing his comedy chops and finding acting gigs.

'I kept my day job for a long time,” he said. 'I dealt with an enormous amount of stage fright for the first 10 years.”

He continues to keep one foot in acting, and has had numerous roles in commercials, film and television, including a self-titled sitcom based on his family life in New York.

His latest projects are the biopics 'Chuck” and 'Chappaquiddick.” The first is a sports drama about boxer Chuck Wepner (played by Liev Schreiber), who went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali in a 1975 heavyweight world championship bout. Gaffigan plays Wepner's best friend.

In 'Chappaquiddick,” he plays District Attorney Paul Markham, who was on the island the night in 1968 when a car driven by Sen. Ted Kennedy plunged off a bridge, killing passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. Gaffigan feels the new movie will shed some light on the incident that dominated headlines.

'It takes a real glance at some of the events that led up to it and scenarios,” he said. 'There's a lot of theories about what happened that night and how it played out.”

- Diana Nollen, The Gazette